


Intermezzo

by freddieofhearts, LydianNode



Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Insecurity, Missing Scene, Multiple Pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22271332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freddieofhearts/pseuds/freddieofhearts, https://archiveofourown.org/users/LydianNode/pseuds/LydianNode
Summary: 10 July, 1986: On the eve of the Wembley concerts, guitar practice is in order.It’s one of the brilliantly blue late afternoons that only July brings, and it should be a haven. This is their rest before the cacophony, the eye of the storm of their revivified fame. Yet Brian sits in his kitchen with only a sweating glass of water in front of him—aimless—and worse, anxious.
Comments: 51
Kudos: 65





	Intermezzo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [royaltyisshe64](https://archiveofourown.org/users/royaltyisshe64/gifts).



It’s one of the brilliantly blue late afternoons that only July brings, and it should be a haven. This is their rest before the cacophony, the eye of the storm of their revivified fame. Yet Brian sits in his kitchen with only a sweating glass of water in front of him—aimless—and worse, anxious.

It’s an anxiety that won’t be allayed by internal argument. He’s almost sickened by it, or by himself, or by the heat. All of the above, he thinks, spinning the wet glass in his hand.

He took Red home as soon as they got to London, but left his acoustic and Roger’s Strat for Jobby to drop off at the studio. He thinks of pets given half reluctantly to a child: to be cared for as a marker of that responsibility that is always crescive and usually stultifying. Neglected, wilting in their hutches without food. He was always, in his own way, a conscientious boy, the easy receiver of trust, the good example. It’s not a crime against helplessness he can possibly recall, since he never committed it.

But if Red is his special pet now, and he’s abandoned the others, what kind of man is he?

He can almost laugh: submitting to the penance of London traffic, and driving himself, even! In no mood for wrangling about Jobby’s competence, and can’t he trust anyone to do their job; does he think raging paranoia a laudable quality? At least, in himself. No, he does not.

He goes anyway.

Stopping and starting in the usual places, only just managing not to stall the car, he’s taken aback by magnolia trees which haven’t yet dropped their blossoms. No longer only sweet, the decaying edge is perceptible, like stone fruit left in the bowl too long. And yet—and yet, the scent swimming in at his windows is still something he wants to gulp, in lungfuls.

It’s like walking back from school late. The end of the summer term, another year put to bed, prizes won, and the always-too-short sleeves of his shirt rolled up. Replete for the length of his warm, sweet-smelling walk; knowing he’d done well, before the next oscillation of his mood or his father’s mood spun it away.

Parking is easy. The door, though … unlocked, which he hadn’t expected, and at once he thinks it must be Roger. Nothing will tear John from his family today, and Freddie’s probably being waited on hand and foot.

It’s surprising that Roger’s here, but not impossible, and Brian’s almost pleased—he is pleased for half a minute.

Until he gets properly inside, and it’s dark enough to see scarcely anything, but he hears the guitar, all right, Roger’s left the door open … and then at once, he’s angrier than he knows how to bear.

If that’s Roger with his grubby paws on the acoustic again, blood will be shed.

Insensitive bastard, Brian fumes, making for the door as fast as he can. Roger wouldn’t have it, if Brian was thrashing away on his kit, now, would he? He hauls the door wide open, already raising his voice: “Roger, I have _told_ you not to touch—oh, God, sorry, Freddie–”

It isn’t Roger at all.

“Brian!” Freddie, and a screech of pick against strings as he’s startled, poor thing, and of course, since it’s him, he isn’t touching one of Brian’s instruments. He wouldn't in a hundred years.

He looks almost as guilty as if he were, though, Brian sees immediately. Dark eyes wide, backing away.

“Sorry—I’m sorry.” He puts it down, slow and careful—but there’s another twang, and Brian sees Freddie flinch.

Freddie wants to repeat it again, but he’s stammering, which irritates people, so perhaps it’s better to shut up. After all, Brian has caught him murdering a guitar: if he’s going to be told off, it might be simplest to get it over with. He tries to square his shoulders. Stand up like a man, they used to say. Stop slouching about.

Of course he isn’t _upset_ —only surprised. It’s not as if Brian would hurt him. No, indeed, he’s been kinder than Freddie deserves, all the time they’ve been touring. Forgiving what he can’t possibly understand.

Even though Brian has his hands in the air, palms outward in the universal gesture of “there there, dear, I won’t hurt you,” Freddie still shrinks away. The guitar is a poor fortification, too small and fragile even to protect such a small, fragile man.

Brian reaches for it now as if it were his own child, and Freddie, who has no children, relinquishes it.

“You need a new low E.” Brian adjusts the pitch minutely as he slides easily in next to Freddie in the oversized chair, and Freddie’s mouth feels sour with shame that he can’t even tune the bloody thing correctly.

“What’re you working on, a new song?” That would be odd, in such a short break from touring, but Freddie defies reason sometimes.

Freddie shakes his head. He lifts a traitorous, shaking hand to cover his mouth as he says, “I was practising. Or trying to.”

Eager to hide his flushed face, or just to hide, he tucks himself more deeply into the chair, curling up tight in the space that remains. Brian wraps a long arm around him, enveloping him in the Brian-scent of herbal shampoo and the metallic tang of strings.

When Freddie lets out a relieved gasp at the touch, Brian puts the guitar aside and lowers his head.

“Why are you practising guitar? Are you writing?” Brian asks. His question is frank curiosity—he wouldn’t mock, wouldn’t tease Freddie in this mood—but Freddie still doesn’t want to admit to anything, not while he feels as maudlin as he does.

His little moue, which doesn’t fool Brian one bit, is followed by a flow of self-deprecating words.

“Not exactly...” Freddie looks down, then bites his lip, feeling suddenly worse. Brian doesn’t even recognise it when he tries. A song they’ve done for years. “I—I’m not good at this...”

Brian either misses the point or kindly pretends to, in order to give Freddie time to craft a reason that won’t make him so unhappy. “Good at...?”

Freddie swallows hard. “Is it too late—I mean, we can still make changes—if it’s to make it perfect, better than me mucking things up–”

He doesn’t want to sound like he’s making a fuss, but he must be worse than he’d thought. Actively bad, and no one’s told him. The knowledge is a cold ache in his ribs, the most awful thing yet today. There’s needing to get better, which he already knew, and then there’s being utterly inadequate, not up to his job. Spoiling the song—the show—the whole damned Wembley recording that starts so soon, too soon, _tomorrow_.

He mustn’t do that; it all matters more than it ever did, and it’s always mattered more than anything in the world.

Freddie is right here, as close as he can be, Brian tells himself. Yet he’s gone away again, retreated into his worries—it’s something Brian recognises, a silent kinship which has always stirred special warmth between them.

On this tour, there’s been too much going off separately—by Freddie in particular, which pains Brian, because aren’t things better now? He’d thought they were. Or were supposed to be, with the worst tussles put to bed.

All this wool-gathering. He doesn’t like the strained expression on Freddie’s face, so he says, “Look, Freddie—of course we can still make changes, if you really want … You know that. But is everything—I mean, are you okay? With Jim?”

It’s usually the seat of Frederician discontent, isn’t it? Often enough that it makes sense to ask the question, if it’s draining his confidence as badly as this.

Now he blinks at Brian and looks, if possible, even more upset than before.

“Did someone say something?” he gets out. “I thought—who told you he isn’t happy?”

Brian wouldn’t mind never hearing him sound like that again. Freddie’s trembling, tense as a prey animal, even though Brian still has an arm round him and that often works to keep him a little more calm.

“God, Freddie,” Brian says. “No—I didn’t mean—I just meant, is he nice to you? A gentleman, that sort of thing.”

He keeps his voice terribly light for the last few words, a confection of tone, covering up what can’t be said. Did I make a mistake, thinking he wasn’t going to slap you around? Are you avoiding your own house, that great big silly thing you love, that you’ve worked so hard on—because he’s there? Shall I take you home with me? Because I will, you know, I will.

When Freddie finally speaks, his voice is lowered, small and cautious. “You know I was feeling a bit mouldy in Newcastle, dear–” Brian nods, and Freddie continues. “Well, last night, it’s horrible, but I was sick in our bed. I didn’t mean to, of course, and it must have been vile for Jim, the most hideous shock—but he was so kind about it. Just carried me into the bathroom like … like Scarlett O’Hara.”

Brian splutters at this image. He ought to be more worried about Freddie being fully recovered for Wembley, but then it’s difficult not to see such obstacles only as things that Freddie throws himself against, like a sparking flint.

Still, he isn’t heartless. “Sorry you were sick,” he says belatedly, picturing Freddie in a Scarlett O’Hara gown and aware of how much he’d enjoy it.

“Oh, I’m fine! Just greedy and silly. But you see, don’t you? Jim. I don’t know what I’ll do when he does leave.” Or rather I _know_ , Freddie thinks, but how I’ll bear it: that’s the conundrum. He can’t tell Brian, and he isn’t going to tell Brian, and there’s nothing at all to tell him, anyway. “Working yourself up”, Roger always called it: a nanny-ish phrase, more comforting than it should be.

What a complete arse I am, Brian thinks. Finding him upset; making it all ten times worse. Stamping about with my clodhopping feet. They’re Chrissy’s words, but ones that’ve stuck since first uttered.

“I only asked,” he says slowly, “Because things have been going well, haven’t they? I mean, except for bloody Dublin, but you can’t count that–”

Freddie counts it. Dublin sticks in his throat like a bone. “If they don’t know how to appreciate us,” he’d said after the concert, when everyone was feeling more or less bruised in the fingers or the feelings. “If they haven’t the good taste–” He flounced onto a sofa, raging, and tired almost past what he could bear. “–Then that’s all very well! We’ll never darken their wretched doors again.”

“–So I thought maybe you’d come out here more to—to get a break from the house…” Brian’s trying to sound pacifying and reasonable, like a man who’s never watched Freddie progress through every agonising stage of “mad about the boy”.

“I love the house! I want to see the cats, of course I do, I missed my babies terribly–”

Brian has taken part in any number of interminable conversations on the subject of feline welfare, so he nods understandingly, even as Freddie sighs in frustrated love and continues.

“I can’t—oh, darling, I can’t let Dublin happen again, I can’t. And being filmed! I’d die—I mean, it just isn’t fair on the rest of you, especially if I have to do something that’s really quite _easy_ and I still fuck it up…”

Comprehending this torrential anxiety is no walk in the park, but Brian’s had plenty of practice over the years.

“I think they just weren’t in the mood,” he says mildly. “It wasn’t you specifically, Freddie–”

He remembers how, afterwards, Freddie didn’t accept the restorative dose of Stolichnaya already poured out … He hardly seemed to see Joe standing beside him with the glass.

“–It’s ‘Crazy Little Thing’ and if it angers them, they’ll throw things.” Freddie is not quite tearful, but he’s dangerously aware that he might become so. “And when—not ‘if,’ darling, but ‘when’ I fuck up the guitar part … what if they hit you instead of me?”

Brian bows his head so that their noses are nearly touching, they’re so close together in the friendly old chair. He can’t exactly say anything about the throwing-stuff business. None of them likes it, what sane person would? But he knows Freddie feels it more—really despises it, worse even than all the names they used to hurl at him in the early days.

It’s something about the crowd’s hostility. When they don’t flow back to Freddie with the rising swell upon swell of feeling, the high blue-green tide, that usually Freddie can find in anyone. He’s like a sculptor confronted with a block of marble. Each new crowd, the shape of it, is something he finds with expert almost-ease. Failure baffles him.

Brian thinks of Mexico. John bleeding and Roger swearing. Freddie’s shaking hand held tight in Brian’s, in a dingy underground room. The striped half-light.

“What if I fuck it up?” He ignores Freddie’s indignant howl and gives his shoulders a squeeze. “Wouldn’t hurt me to polish my playing,” he lies gently, as he gets up and lifts his well-loved acoustic. Nothing fits his hands so well, except for Red.

Freddie already misses the comforting heat. Brian’s lying, yes, but he knows how to appreciate a kind falsehood: the worth of it. There are plenty of men out there who won’t take the trouble to deceive you.

Brian’s smile isn’t quite hidden by his hair when he returns to Freddie’s side, pressed hip-to-hip. “Count us in, Fred.”

And Freddie does. He’d follow Brian’s music to the ends of the earth. To the last outposts of human habitation, and beyond, into the wilderness.

They strum in perfect unison—Brian has slowed the tempo down so that Freddie’s fingers won’t squeak on the strings from gripping too tightly out of nerves—but that’s just not good enough for Freddie.

He envies the graceful slide of Brian’s spider-leg fingers up and down the fretboard, the casual way his thumb curves around to play low notes, the way his vibrato resonates as if from the body of a singer. Freddie nearly blows the Dsus4 chord, again, and leans forward to register how Brian gets there from B-flat to C without tripping over his own fingers.

He doesn’t notice the subtle shift of Brian’s body to allow him a clearer view.

Brian sneaks a look at Freddie. He wants to shout praises, shower him with affection and approbation—but of course Freddie would balk, would shake it off with a silvery laugh and not believe it. Settling for a nod and a brief smile, Brian turns back to his own guitar and lets Freddie continue his observations.

Years before, he used to listen to Freddie practising in his haphazardly studious way. He could do something with it, if he’d just spend a little more time, Brian had thought then. They could finish _Sheer Heart Attack_ … Freddie picked things up in a day that had taken Brian months. Wouldn’t it make sense. But of course, no go.

And what Freddie has in loyalty, he lacks in confidence –

Yes. Even now, he’s grimacing in frustration at some tiny flaw.

He stops playing. The slap of his palm against innocent guitar strings makes Brian wince, which in turn sends Freddie’s insecurities into overdrive. “This is ridiculous! It’s the last song before our encores, and if I keep fucking it up, the crowd won’t want any fucking encores!”

“It’s fine, really…” Brian soothes. He sets his instrument aside and reaches for Freddie’s arm, but Freddie jerks away.

“I’m the weakest guitar player. You’re amazing and John’s not far behind. Roger plays so much better than I do. Spike plays guitar _and_ piano better. I don’t belong out there with this in my hand,” Freddie declares, shaking the poor guitar until it rattles.

Brian liberates it lest it get damaged and send Freddie into an even worse state. “Freddie, really, you do a great job on this. The crowds love it when you play guitar–”

“The crowds are idiots.”

“I love it, too. So, am I an idiot?”

Freddie’s hands flutter all over the front of his face, as if he can’t decide whether to hide his teeth or the colour rising in his cheeks. Brian chooses to pretend he doesn’t see—although it tugs at his heart in ways he has never comprehended—and instead pulls his own guitar onto his knee. He noodles around in F major and before he realises it, he’s playing the opening bars to ‘Love of My Life.’

He gives Freddie a tiny, crooked smile and, thank God, Freddie smiles back as he starts to sing.

It’s Freddie’s angel voice, as Roger calls it, the quality that emerges when he’s singing in an intimate setting, never in public. Only a handful of people have ever experienced this treat. Brian savours the way Freddie’s voice wraps around him and only him, a loving but not-quite-lovers’ embrace.

When Freddie intones, “Don’t take it away from me,” Brian feels a cold sense of loss all the way to the marrow of his bones. Ridiculous, he tells himself, and he focuses instead on making each note of his arpeggios match the timbre of Freddie’s song.

Freddie’s sung it hundreds of times. Maybe a thousand, he thinks, with the fraction of his mind that is not whited-out in music. _When I grow older._ Well: you can write all sorts of things.

His own body could be the guitar that Brian is playing, in a way that looks effortless. Every one of his strings, touched at the right moment, and now something sings in him, through him –

Over far too soon. Brian looks to Freddie in case he wants to make suggestions, but Freddie’s face is stilled, almost beatified.

“You’re perfect, darling,” he murmurs, as he leans so, so gently against Brian’s side, lest he be pushed away.

“Mmmm.” Brian stretches one long arm up in the air and folds the other one around Freddie, pulling him closer. “I have my car here—do you need a lift home?” Freddie can’t possibly have got here under his own steam, but he seems lonely enough for the question not to be absurd. He could, Brian supposes, have sent his retinue away, like a wayward monarch in a fairy story.

Freddie closes his eyes. It’s tempting. It’s even more tempting to tell Brian to keep on driving until they get somewhere quiet, just the two of them, where they won’t have to fret about concerts and recordings and all the vagaries of life on the road. There’s just no time. Not now.

Unfair to patient Terry waiting with the car, and dutiful Joe in the studio’s kitchen, probably lurking around with one of the bottomless cups of tea they’ve been forcing down him. And yet—he wants it, with a little guilty piece of his soul, he wants to escape. He’s always been selfish.

Freddie shakes his head, his hair catching on the fibres of the godawful jumper Brian chose to wear. “Joe brought me, and he’s around here somewhere. But thanks,” he adds, daring—what a brave boy he is—to draw nearer to Brian, to let himself be cuddled.

The stress of touring has taken its toll on them all. Roger’s hands bleed, John’s mental state deteriorates. Brian knows his own tendency to harbour black dogs. But it’s hardest on Freddie. Exhausting. It’s madness to leap about as much as he does, bounding back and forth like pinballs, flying across the stage as if he’s a magical creature.

This creature has fallen asleep, completely relaxed in the circle of Brian’s arms.

With a sigh Brian thinks of the wife and children waiting for him to come home. They’ll just have to wait a little longer; no one could begrudge Freddie this rest and comfort, such as it is. Brian knows he’s far from the softest pillow. He begins to hum a lullaby then stops himself, knowing the sleeper wakes much too easily. _Hush, hush, whisper who dares_ , he’s read to his little ones, and the memory warms him, though Freddie makes a funny Christopher Robin.

He still remembers the way enervated, overworked Freddie smelled when he and Roger half-carried him home after gigs, all brilliantine and stage sweat mixed with the sweet-earth smell of greasepaint. Tonight he smells simpler: tobacco and warm skin. Which scents will drift from a sleepy Freddie in the years to come? It’s an odd thought, as Brian breathes him in once more.

And when they are old men? Brian closes his eyes. Freddie has given him, again, the sign and seal of trust. Sightless, Brian takes his hand. It’s limp with sleep, and in the self-made dark, feels smaller than usual.

*


End file.
